It’s a midterm year, everyone – which means you can expect a wide array of midterm-heavy content from us. You can expect a special emphasis on the race for control of the Senate, which by virtue of Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote, is just barely held by the Democrats, and Republicans appear to be poised to retake based on generic ballot polling.   Democrats are defending 14 seats and Republicans 20, while a number of incumbent senators (five Republicans and one Democrat) have announced their retirements after this Congress. 

While we’re not ready to start rating many of these races, we can begin to assess which seats up in 2022 are uniquely vulnerable. Though Republican retirements in North Carolina and Pennsylvania are tantalizing for Democrats, this week we will be focusing on incumbent senators who plan to run again in November. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll profile the senator, the race, and the outlook, starting with our fifth most vulnerable incumbent and running through to our first. 

Democratic New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan first won her seat by an incredibly slim margin in 2016, defeating incumbent Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte by just over 1,000 votes (close results will become a very obvious pattern here). It was the closest New Hampshire Senate election since 1974, when Republican Louis Wyman’s two-vote victory over Democrat John Durkin was annulled, triggering a special election in 1975 – the longest contested congressional election in American history. Since then, Hassan has kept a low profile, but has had some recent stand out moments this past year during negotiations regarding the bipartisan infrastructure deal – an apt strategy to present herself as a centrist candidate in the politically-obsessed “Live Free or Die” culture of the Granite State.

It may seem odd we start our list admitting this outright, but it projects a point about the race for control of the Senate overall – this is not an election that is particularly likely to go against Hassan at the moment. That this is the “fifth most vulnerable” Senate election speaks volumes about how uncompetitive many of the incumbent races in this cycle are. It could have been competitive had the state’s current governor, Republican Chris Sununu, entered the race. Sununu, who won 65% of the vote in his 2020 reelection as governor (on the same ballot where Joe Biden won the state by 7% over Trump), turned down the national Republicans imploring him to run in what they saw as a winnable race, and said he plans to run for reelection as governor in 2022 instead. His polling has also been on the slide over the last few months, which may have factored into this decision, but without Sununu, this race is by no means a true toss-up. 

If anything, this is the only “likely Democrat” race in the country – everything more competitive leans towards one party over the other or is a simple toss-up, and everything less competitive is safe for one party over another.